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Phew.

I’ve written 81 six-word stories today. This puts me at 149 (target is 150.) I deliberately stopped there to avoid setting off my fear of catching up, and hopefully avoid my pattern of following triumph with disaster as well. See, I am sneaky with my sneaking around myself!

If you’d told me when I woke up this morning that I’d finish today where I am now, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’m over the moon (though trying not to get TOO over the moon because of the aforementioned triumph-disaster pattern.) Something just shifted in my head and I realised that catching up could be quite simple.

The big learning I need to take away from this is that when I’m behind, screw writing long, high-quality stories and just churn out the six-worders and get caught up. I wish I’d done this ages ago rather than leaving it until I had to write 81!

A nice side-effect of this is that six-word stories can be handwritten in nothing flat, which means I can catch up on some folding as well (I can’t use the printer until the housemate and her laptop get home in the New Year.)

I’ve been noticing some patterns in my six-word stories. Lots of things becoming sentient, lots of (sometimes violent) reversals of the normal order, lots of messing with time and space, lots of creepiness, and a sharp rise in existential ponderings and ecstatic mystical babble towards the end… hmm.

Most of this makes sense with what I know of myself, but the sentience thing surprises me. I think of myself as someone who has very little attachment to or investment in objects, and yet I keep coming back to the idea that they can think, feel, and love. This does absolutely make sense with who I was as a young child, and now I think about it, my story about Umbrellas (which is entirely true). Interesting.